Babel Response

      The film Babel is an emotional and thought-provoking pictorial exemplar of transnationality.  Heavily employing a powerful theme of loss enables the film to express the ways in which different experiences of loss throughout different peoples in different locations influence the ways in which we live and experience the world. The initial  circumstances of loss we experience as an audience are those of a lost child within the white, Western familial unit, a loss of personal agency for the Mexican home keeper,  and within the Asian girl's life, a lost mother and a loss of hearing. The white couple also portray a loss of individual comfort within a foreign, "dangerous" land, exemplified in the wife's disdain toward the ice cubes in Brad Pitt's coke. The Middle Eastern boys loss of innocence after their mistaken target practice with a crowded bus takes a transnational turn on the televisions across the globe, describing the, quite innocent, shooting as a "terrorist" attack.  Would the same headlines have spread if the boys were American and practicing their shooting in Texas?  

      Important to the transnational loss theme are the Mexican woman and her nephew's loss of dignity at the border and the Asian girl's loss of esteem after failing to achieve the socially-advertised mandates of sexuality. At the border, the Mexican man and woman are treated as if they are mischievous, dark-hearted children, and the border patrol agents act like hounds rather than border representatives of the United States.  The nephew's anger and fear-filled compulsions lead to more loss for the Mexican woman, who loses her job and home at the whims of the aforementioned hounds. Borders and citizenship become entangled and complicated in the minds of the viewer, who should see the woman as a hardworking and relatable character. Due to the Asian girl's deafness and harsh (depressed) persona, she loses every chance at expressing her, prescribed, sexuality. At the start of the film she is teased for not partaking in sexual activity, and the media scenes and people throughout the city pulsate with Westernized sexuality, one the the girl is never able to realize. Here, the transnational notions of sexuality and beauty overpower the already fractured individual. Babel's multiple, interweaving narratives illustrate the ways in which an individual's circumstances construct and are constructed by various transnational vectors.